Your own people aren't always exactly your own people.

In the past month, in terms of the tough standards I set for myself, I failed at life (out of exhaustion over exponentially-increased teaching duties) in that I allowed myself to be surprised by certain human behaviour.
In one instance, this surprise morphed within me into the enemy of the human being, the feeling of injustice. Intellectually I know that righteous indignation is a dead-end street: called in some languages a "blind corner", which is exactly what I mean here. I don't know that I would be blogging about this quite in this way, had I not come across the sentence I used as the subject here: "Your own people aren't always exactly your own people." It is a fecund sentence for contemplation. One illustration could be of quondam parentals leaving children to choose their own adventure with absolutely no guidance after the first teen year, who later think they have a right to be critical of said children.
But there is another meaning of the quoted sentence that I have been musing over. Another could be related to patriotism. My family has members living all over the world; I have always taken it for granted that one can be both a patriot and a cosmopolite (who can be humble enough to learn from other cultures). To a certain degree (and to be not at all humble for a moment), I also thought that such a generous patriotism was easier for compatriots like myself than for people hailing from other countries (for historical reasons). Compatriots who reach cosmopolite status share a curiosity for esoteric aspects of other cultures and have the intellectual capacity for such appreciation (gaining, for example, expert knowledge of their antiques), and are crowned by a humility, in part stemming from a knowledge of the complexities of the history of their own country...

But today, this approach has come under fire. There is a new kind of patriotism defined in more narrow terms, as if, if one does not comply with these narrow qualifications, one does not love one's country. I can understand that somewhat - it is a kind of reactionism, not unlike my own of righteous indignation mentioned above. But on the other hand, such an approach would warrant if not a fail then a very low grade in not only my class on culture but also my composition class.
To begin with the (advanced) composition class, I set the intellectual exercise that opinions are not academically valid; what is valid is a thesis that has support and is able to articulate and respond to (through rebuttal or concession) viewpoints that challenge one's thesis. In other words, students are welcome to their 'opinions' so long as they can articulate them in terms of viewpoints that might challenge them (yes, this is derived from δόξα). Part of the course is built on cultivating an imagination that can articulate other viewpoints (which I - again not humbly - take to be part of the intellectual legacy of my native land). Similarly, my advanced class on culture demonstrates through examples that a single culture can be paradoxical, and is often comprised of myriad competing world views. This even came up in my intro class: through the example, for instance, of how not all former colonies immediately ratified the Articles of the Confederation. Unity does not necessarily mean unanimity.
How do we respond to scarcity of agreement?
For some, this means that it is no longer a time for the "college games" of dialectics; to them, it means war. Truth can come back another day.

So I ask myself: how do I talk to someone who from the get-go is approaching questions through their agenda? (The new orthodoxy of secularism, or of zealous liberalism, is no more tolerant or different than any religion.) Are you, readers, also wanting to ask me why it's a problem to approach life through an agenda? When I tried, with my interlocutors of late, to explain the complexities of statecraft and the importance of grappling - as contradictory as it may seem - with even abstract ideas like 'truth' in the practical business of statesmanship, if I dared call on Plato, my interlocutors' eyes would glaze over. Which I know from teaching means I need to change my approach. So, in answer to my question of how to talk with agenda-driven interlocutors, reason is not the way. Or, one must learn to package reason differently.
Since yesterday, every time I think about this, I am left with an anecdote from Rumer Godden's autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, with which I shall close this blog post. She writes of how back in the day, authors would often receive requests for an autograph and/or signed photograph. She explains that before she knew better to respond only to those who sent return postage, she would oblige at least the many signature requests though the postage was costly (obliging the photograph requests would have been far too costly). "I had a letter from America with the usual request, sent an autograph and a little later" she writes, "had a second letter; 'Thank you for your autograph. We have had your handwriting analysed. You are mean, petty, selfish and greedy.'"

Global Amnesia vs. Goethean Relevations

The blog Laudator Temporis Acti cited a few lines from Euripides today in a post entitled: "Transient Global Amnesia". The lines read: "What place did I leave to get here? How did I arrive?/ I cannot remember: my former state of mind has left me." I had written of my own experience of such on my other blog - but the lines reveal the state to be a predicament.
I am still busy, with troubled heart, working my way out of it - and coincidentally today read a beautiful explanation of the phrase τετιημένος ἦτορ, troubled in the heart at Sententiae Antiquae: To be troubled in the heart is essentially to be "occupied with [one's] own thoughts, living in an internal dream rather than engaging in the outside world".
The dreaming is prompted by being faced by a dreaded, constrictive future. The S.A. post ends with a suggestion of the way out from this: a heart that "grows" through "listening to the speech of other men". What speech of other men can cure the effects of global amnesia?
Firstly, it should be pointed out that not all global amnesia is self-inflicted. What of the lives of what I could call "hybrid babies" (taking the Bakhtinian word): those whose earliest and formative years were not steeped in the local? If transient globality is amenesia, what is remembering to one who never "left" to forget in the first place? Finally, what is the local to one who seeks to be a "citizen of the world"?
We know that Goethe, to some extent, popularized such concepts in more modern times. For example, in his Eckermann conversations in which he famously spoke of his idea of world literature, he said: "poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men." The poet is to present, "something higher and better" in a manner intelligible to a place and time (thence, Shakespeare "makes his Romans Englishmen"). There is no superficial adventurism here (we remember, "adventure" was scorned even by Barthes in his essay on "Neither ... Nor Criticism"). Goethe explicitly says the point is not to seek "unheard-of adventures" but to masterfully re-present the wisdom of the ancients. Western cultures should draw on ancient Western wisdom. This is an answer to "global amnesia".

This is also the alethia of "saying" something that "means" (I am quoting Gadamer): saying something that "serves to clarify something". The task of the modern hybrid person is to find such meaning, and I argue that the hybrid person has more at stake to find such meaning, because that meaning is the only home they will ever have. That person knows, too, like what Gadamer via Heidegger, says: "there can never be a total recovery of meaning" (emphasis added). But this is no modern idea! Hadot has done marvelous work in The Veil of Isis tracing the idea that some knowledge will always be concealed existed in various guises from antiquity until quite recently. Hybrid people feel their incompleteness: it is their τετιημένος ἦτορ. Hopefully, though, they find counsel in "the speech of other men" and, like Goethe encouraged, craft something new and "make something of a simple subject". Incidentally, I once blogged of the work of another graduate from one of my boarding schools who made something unique: Mrinalni Sarabhai, who made her culture intelligible to other cultures through dance. One wonders if she understood the needs of the foreign audience through her own early uprooting to that foreign culture, during formative years...

Book in background: Boucher's 1,000 Years of Fashion. Brush: Ewansim via DeviantART.

Every Hole Evolves a Whole

Sometimes when I think about "home" it becomes the negative concept of where I am not. But I know that even if I were to go to where a certain part of me could be met, there would be other things missing. Kristeva compares foreigners to Io, who was pursued by the οἶστρος - a gadfly, but also a word used by Plato to denote irrational drives, the "gadfly of desire" - sending her across many seas. Even though Io returns to a normal life of motherhood in Egypt, if one has travelled, surely one has the opportunity to look for better stories to provide schemes for understanding.
Except that by bringing something out of its context through comparison, one risks changing a story's essence. This can happen once one has chosen to objectify something - the way of looking that makes an idea foreign by setting it apart from the familiarity of cohabitation. Hadot writes how objectification of prefabricated phrases decontextualises them, now misinterpreted and mistranslated. Yet some ideas built out of misunderstanding, "have brought about important evolutions."
The traveller wishing to be systematic about all the stories he or she collects realises what Hadot writes, that the actual progress of thought functions rationally outside the bounds of mathematical thought or Hegelian dialectics. One becomes like Lévi-Strauss. One also comes to realise the large gap between the artistic freedom of making something new and the learned respect for the sometimes elusive meaning of the original context. Hadot explains that we cannot be sure of the original meaning of γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself. It is possible to wander the earth like a disinherited maiden, making a patchwork quilt of deracinated maxims. This is our home, we may say, as we put the quilt into the dowry box which indeed follows us to that next home, wherever it may be.
Thence the notion of atopia - which we next find in Hadot's "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse." Here, atopia refers to the strangeness of the philosopher in the human world. "For such a man, daily life, as it is organised and lived by other men, must appear abnormal, like a state of madness, unconsciousness, and ignorance of reality. And nonetheless he must live this life every day, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others perceive him to be one as well. And it is precisely in this daily life that he must seek to attain that way of life which is utterly foreign to the everyday world. The result is a perpetual conflict between ... the life one should live and the customs and conventions of daily life."
There are many forms of homelessness.

And if I return to stories of travelling, instead of looking to Hermes, troublesome in that he is honoured by thieves, I will think of 孙悟空 who is himself possibly a retelling - a story taken from its context, of Hanuman from the Ramayama. He is Sun Wukong, the monkey king, who gains supernatural powers from practicing the Tao. I choose 孙悟空 because he makes a Journey to the West, accompanying a Buddhist monk to retrieve the wisdom of the sutras. His travels are based on service, and the goal of the travels is knowledge that sets us free, not material wealth.
As Hadot says: we are wont to privilege who we are over what we have. What we have is also a place. But some people hide behind the conventions of the place, never rising above it to the courage to be a friend to those who may be passing through, i.e. those who feel their transience.
Who are we? I find that a very difficult question, on par with the question I am often asked, "Why do you live here?"
So I will answer in story, and take liberties like in Lee-Hom Wang's music video 伯牙絕弦 which takes its theme from the tale of BoYa and incorporates elements of Chinese calligraphy, reminding me of the hours I would play alone imagining that art as my childhood friends were learning it. What I remember about it were the very strict and subtle rules - only the trained eye could recognise the characteristics of superior calligraphy. Knowing those rules, it was surprising to me to see calligraphy appear as it does in the video. I was also surprised at how fusion in the video is a beat that is primarily Western. Why.
My story then is a Journey to the East, I don't have 孙悟空, a monkey companion - but like Sun Wukong, I have a character who is "awakened to emptiness." I could also do without his violence. In my story, the protagonists are also travelling for spiritual wisdom. Why spiritual? Because - and here I will borrow from Hadot, the words "'psychic,' 'moral,' 'ethical,' 'intellectual,' 'of thought,' 'of the soul' - cover all the aspects of reality we want to describe." Those words do "not indicate clearly enough the imagination and sensibility play a very important role ... although intellectual factors as definition, division .. reading, investigations, and ehtorical amplification play a large role ... [as do] ... therapeutics of the passions". 'Spiritual' indicates not merely thought "but the individual's entire psychism."

My story in progress is about bringing the whole world into oneself, through sympathy, because to only see part of the world or be in part of the world is bound to make one feel empty. As Gadamer has written, even if one has experienced a new culture and context fully through hermeneutics, and assimilates it to the point of privileging it, one can never forget one's first context.
We can remember Bakhtin: hybrids emerge. Must we, even if we wish so much to respect original context, fear the hybrid? Surely, in the final analysis, there has always been much idea exchange - and then periods of assimilation and formation of tradition. When I think of "tradition" I think of Chinese calligraphy and African masks in the sense that both have very strict rules, and any innovation must be within those guidelines, never complete transformation.
I would argue that to reach such subtle lines of definition of what something "is" represents some form of transcendence. Finesse. I do not see refinement in much of the quotidian, which is not to say that it is not there, just that it is today often beneath the surface.
A holistic globe would allow for such subtleties and yet allow for the "dance of meeting from form to form" that Davenport writes of, his example being the iconographic shift of a Macedonian coin depicting the head of Hermes on one side and a winged horse on the other, morphing, from copy to copy, into the Celtic coin that forms the image on the cover of his collection of essays Every Force Evolves a Form.
Just as much as I feel tension in never quite belonging in any single place, I feel tension in my very strong penchant for the uniform (even literally) and tradition where it is most clear cut. The formula I have found to allow for free, spontaneous creative play and respect for tradition is through the hermeneutic experience which looks to first listen to the tradition and then, once one has been informed by it, look to where it relates to the present moment. One is to try very hard not to misunderstand. But this ultimately depends on whether our own experience has made us ready to receive the new information.
So in the final count, it is a problem of audiences and the "impossibility of the general audience" (Hadot). We have not always been made empty enough to hold the fullness that is life. We are sometimes impatient to understand things that we have not made ourselves worthy of, or have not completed the appropriate prerequisites to properly access.

Watercolour brush. Magazine.

To Be a Man in Language

(Updated, now twice, due to post being poorly written.) The curious thing about plunging into Homeric Greek is getting used to the strange syntax - I have temporarily left the secure bay of Pharr and plunged into random verse and passage on my own, to seek the raft of that which can be intuited in a language. It is more exciting, and allows the language to fall in place place in a new way. There is something to be said for renewing one's interest in study by playing in that same field.
For activities not required by me professionally, I work very slowly, imitating my preference for long distance sport. Because I work in academia, I only see my shortcomings: that is how I understand the responsibility even of the underling. I often broadcast these failings here, which is something I must change now. Today, I was directed to an old post of mine because so many people read it and I realised how it might be misinterpreted without the context of my other posts - I forget that some readers are here to make very quick judgments. 
One of the difficulties of taking on even more work in academia (i.e. to try to get at least a broad idea of related fields) is that hard to find a professor to take one on. The fact that the system today allows one to, say, write about Victorian literature without at least knowing how to transcribe Greek, if for no other reason than to translate epigrams in the incipit of books, is absurd. The level of specialisation can hurt the range of certain questions one might want to pose. This only bolsters those who are self-satisfied within their narrow field, uninterested in larger questions of meaning, and opposed to those who love the horizon.
It is a rhetorical tactic to not argue outside of the bounds of one's familiarity, but to lead the argument to the territory one knows. This tactic isn't always fair: once one knows to watch out for it, it is astounding how many 'unbeatable' arguments suddenly diminish in imposing stature. One must know what one is good at, or at least have an idea of one's path that might lead to ever greater clarity. I've heard this embarrassingly simplistically phrased as, "following one's gift: what one enjoys." I think, though I may be wrong, that I am good at seeing connections between ideas.
So I am swimming in Homeric Greek when I am not (still) reading Gadamer's Truth and Method. And since I am not on holiday somewhere, but in my flat, I reach the sea through Homer's Greek, with Tuft's Perseus as a buoy. In the Iliad book μαχη επι ταις ναυσιν, battle for the ships, Poseidon steps in to help the Greeks. The passage in English by no way stresses the element of gold that is apparent in the Greek, due to syntax:
ὠκυπέτα χρυσέῃσιν ἐθείρῃσιν κομόωντε, 25
χρυσὸν δ᾽ αὐτὸς ἔδυνε περὶ χροΐ, γέντο δ᾽ ἱμάσθλην
χρυσείην εὔτυκτον, ἑοῦ δ᾽ ἐπεβήσετο δίφρου,
In this image, I get the picture of the almost blinding effect of the wide open sea when the sun shines down and is reflected even brighter in the sea which turns into a plate or even shield of blinding gold.

So I may be learning Homeric Greek all wrong when I do this, but this is an image that I discovered for myself, that I will remember because I did the work to see it. This might not be scholarly, but it keeps my attention on days when I doubt my intelligence. There are days one plays - when one promises to check one's playing (as per a classicist's advice to check translations with those extant), when one does not take one's playing as a final product but a work in progress. 
Also, one is aware that someone has chartered these waters before, when one benevolently deigns to let oneself on an 'adventure' within that which is already known.
My point here is that sometimes, by 'playing' one might notice something valuable, so why is it so terrible to experiment in one's learning techniques - not as method, but as a way to encourage one to keep learning through the excitement of the immediacy of that experience. The post I rediscovered on this blog that I have now deleted for causing misunderstanding was about how once we have learned something, we are then required to make that language our own - this is how we learn to 'make sense' of what we learn, and not just parrot it. I shall now say at the risk of possibly deleting this later, that where I am standing, those educators who require this step in learning, e.g. asking for a summary of a text in one's own words, are in the minority.
So even where valid methodologies exist, there ought to be room for one's own adventure. In this way, the humanities never get old and one may continuously enjoy them.
To be a man is to (admit when he is wrong, and stand corrected,) be brave, be willing to fight -  i.e. protect both oneself and others from themselves. Who wants to identify with base actions. To be a man in language is to stand behind one's words and carve out a place for oneself in the Bakhtinian battleground of language. Isiah Berlin, for example, was unhappy with trends in philosophy, so became a historian of thought. He figured out how to allow his mind to grow without getting tied down by the rhetoric of apology. The beauty of academia is discourse, therefore we must sometimes fight against trends if this means attempting to keep the breadth of approach (also historically) alive: because of discourse, this must be true even if one disagrees!
While there may have been a time when the lady thinker identified literally with the clothes of the man - one of my favourite books was a French, Victorian volume, Les Femmes Aventureuses, about women taking the guise of the man to reach desired ends, there is now a trend for menswear boutiques to cater to women (viz. 'Maison Scotch'). I don't think I'm aware enough of how influenced I am by the romantic, but if there is such a thing as the heart singing its own intuitive song, the heart has also to man up if it is to have (a chance at) its day, the great golden mirror of day when new strength is gained and life brims with possibility. This, after all, is in line with Gadamer's vision that the truth is both logical and mythical.

Brush.

Hippopotamus, Spiral

The sun has set but there is a persistent dove at my windowsill, not eating grain but watching who knows what in silence with me as I sit and collect my words. I think this is the dove that unfortunately slipped into my flat a while back. The trust these creatures exhibit amazes me: I walked right by it to open the window wide open as it stood, bewildered and disoriented, on my table. (I do not feed doves regularly, but admit that I have attempted to tame them to not fear my hand.)
Most of the time that I think of the words "hand," "sun," or "mercy" I think of Aten, with his hands reaching down from the heavens to the people, including kings, like Akhnaten. To understand such symbols on ancient walls, however, as Hegel pointed out, requires more than just the historical context, but thoughtful meditation. Gadamer writes that we must consider both aesthetics as well as historical consciousness, that we open our senses to our own contemporary life to gain insights into the past. Perhaps a moment with the birds or the animals will do - they appear in so many different ways in ancient art.
We know that the hippopotamus was considered a particularly dangerous animal by the ancient Egyptians (a terrible force for little fishing boats) and it is surmised that it was considered to be a force to be controlled - not only in this life, but in the rivers leading to the afterlife, as well. We may not have to worry about hippopotami what with shipping vessels that outscale the human frame, but we no longer have symbols that may look like animals but point to the perils to be conciliated.

Earlier today, I rifled through old photographs, searching for photos I took of the rock art at the Petroglyph National Monument. I remember standing there and thinking, this makes so much sense, staircases, crosses, spirals - how else does one represent the motions or categories of life. But that was back when I used to assume I could understand anything; now, there is plenty I'd rather not understand at all, rather like what Herzog observed of bears: some things teach us nothing of the world but only about themselves, and their place in the world. Rather like art that takes for its subject the contemporary: there is no guarantee it has the potential to point beyond itself.
But I like to think that bears, if not all human behaviour, does have symbolic potential. In fact, there's a theory that there was once a hunter's taboo on using such animal's names: for whatever reason, it seems some aspects of life are best not addressed head on.
To look through the layers of photographs of oneself from before, one cannot help but wonder whether this creates a new category of the virtual self and virtual thought - labelled as understanding, but rather, nothing more than figments, no longer tangible. Still, one can't but marvel at all the stages one has gone through: up and down the stairs, round and round, plus, minus, there are times perhaps we look nothing like ourselves or who we may later strive to be.
There is shedding in the natural world, and a leaving behind.
What if man could become retrograde, that if there is such a thing as evolution, there is also mental and physical degeneration: the tower falls, the mind is scattered - perhaps across the world, and man is left not even with language but the vaguest primordial intuition to put the pieces back together again.
Like the church Rodin built from nothing more than two hands molded after two people's. I carried that idea with me for years - and think that Gadamer did, too, because he saw the sacred in so many places. He saw it in the symbol that presents the presence of what it represents, thus treated with reverence - as with the flag, for example. Or the holiness of a representation.
I think that to stand before rock art, there is symbolic, even metaphysical, presence, which may be helped by the fact that to see it, one must be standing at the spot, standing among the rocks in their original and natural context. To draw on nature, it seems like a revolutionary idea. We draw over it.

But I could not find my photos of that place, far more varied than the ones one may find on the internet. I remember standing there, and wondering if I would encounter a rattle snake. I was all on my own - I had reached the park by taking the public bus and then walking a way's. All of these factors contributed to the immediacy of my looking. I think this is why people like wildlife safaris: there are no iron bars between the beasts and the jeep, the element of danger is present - but the presence of the animals is also that much closer.
There is no place for presence if interaction shifts to be commanded by buttons. If we are to thoughtfully meditate on life to access the aesthetics, surely we might deepen our inspiration through contact with the animals and plants in the earliest aesthetics. If that is not possible, we may resort to reverence: to behold, become aware of - which, if we follow Hegel's suggestion that we are to interiorise our recollection of an externalised spirit, may be reached less through logic than through the senses of noein.
To see mazes and spirals - is this not to be the amateur mathematician, architect? There is form, measure in this life, translated once into shape, again into language. We feel our way out of this mess.
I could not find the pictures of the past that I was looking for but I found a circular accordion montage of photos from my NM travels, interspersed with renditions of words and images from the petit prince, whose dissatisfaction over drawings of the sheep he requested ended with him being given a drawing of a box. The sheep is inside it, he is told, and he is overjoyed. That was just the sheep he was looking for.
In the box that is our lives - try as we might to break beyond the confines in our audacity to disrespect freedom, for true freedom has no need for greed - in that box, filled with whatever travels, whatever images of past selves and whatever other images that stick to us as if we were a colonne Morris, absorbing instead of reflectively meditating, for that, too, can happen at certain phases of growth, hopefully we see inside ourselves the sheep that we are looking for.

Brush.

Live For Humanity

That was one of George Whitman's phrases, a man who, since his passing, has inspired so many a eulogy online. I only remember him in a thankful haze, but I laughed in recognition when I read this post - with him exclaiming, "That person was a lunatic!" I, too, attended the Sunday teas where I met a panoply of characters: an attached young man who knit his own sweaters (obvious without his admission), who was studying at Le Cordon Bleu, and who would sometimes bring me food he had made in class - what special gifts. There was also the Parisian who claimed - I still shudder at the thought - he would cut pictures out of library books and paste them onto the ceiling of his chambre de bonne.
It was an incredible time to be in Paris, though, perhaps anyone would say that of any charismatic city. There was a Walter Benjamin retrospective at the Pompidou: Le Passant, La Trace, and I am happy to have come to that thinker in such a tactile way: looking through the stereoscopes and at the toys and placards that shaped Benjamin's mind as child and adult - that made up the "modern city" in which he was a passer-by.
I am reminiscing about Paris, but mostly about those who I have known and who have passed on, because I was thinking about such things deep into the night. I suppose I am approaching middle age, well, its lower limits, and I was thinking of the models I hope to emulate if I reach the apex of maturity, like my dear friend I wrote of here.
Yet, I am also relieved that my morning reading brought me to the thought of place as well as people, for it has given me new avenues for thought. How much is place etched into our heart and vice versa? Here, one of the central museums has long closed its shuttered eyes; a winter liability with the mammoth icicles that hang themselves from its upper stories while intrepid locals pass by below. Le passant, la trace... What is the purpose of our lives, what is the trace we hope to leave behind, that little snail trail, always threatened by effacement. Yet is it not also in tandem with place that we make our claim to having lived? Even in this modern age, we are still like plants, needing some soil in which to pot our dancing feet.
In the Benjamin exhibit, he is also presented as one in exile - thus begins the modern tension between several geographic belongings: but as the curator showed: Benjamin is Berlin. Benjamin is Paris. He is also, he is both. I often imagine such paradoxes in Rilke: born in Prague, reborn in Russia, learning to speak in Paris, then wandering to Trieste, Munich, Ronda, Sierre... No wonder he invested so much into trying to reach the universal. And this is the note on which I will rest. All I can do is to try to figure out a tiny part of the equation explaining human experience, make one tessera of contribution. I decided not to worry this year, so all that is left is to live in good faith, and preserve any silvery trails like treasures.

Elements.

Ken and Other Roots

When we know (ken) something, we can name it. In my experience, though, sometimes we misname things we think we know, like in Victorian cartography's fanciful, domineering names.
When I think I understand my native culture; my adolescent cultures; the culture where I live now, I am often seeing my own vision of "inroads into humanity". If one looks hard enough into any culture, one can see all kinds of tenets and traditions: mystics regarded with awe or suspicion; poseurs - even if they are African, seeking Picasso's fictive Africa; liars and saints, corruption and charity.
It is possible to be more of a Romantic than an anthropologist. I, for one, relate to Rilke's pilgrimage to Russia with Andreas-Salome, how the Russia they found was scorned by some natives... How Rilke later saw icons in things, including Rodin's sculptures. It was a way of looking he found, as much as a place. It is possible that 'certain ways of looking' are revered more in some places than in others. Sandburg criticised American culture when it preferred poetry with footnotes to his poems of folk wisdom. Goethe and the brothers Grimm critiqued cerebral German poetry and sought out that same folk. I seek that folk. But the folk exist everywhere, anonymous until heard.
We, the folk, are not static. And unless tradition has been torched like in the attempt by the Futurists, it probably exists somewhere, making gradual, if camouflaging, adjustments to the ever-changing part of life subsumed by history.
Hybrids emerge. Culture is slippery. What isn't so slippery - but still enigmatic, are the universal aspects of humanity. These can be invisible: connected not to what we do, but how we are doing it: Out of love? To destroy? Or do we proceed with awe, respect?
I would guess that what is "folk" - the building blocks of a society - can be rediscovered, if it is lost, through in-listening. The fact that there are proverbs that exist across cultures could be proof of a common sense. Which calls to mind Rodin's primeval Cathedral, with the coming together of two right hands; shelter emerging out of nothing. Reminiscent of Sandburg's Arches, "unbreakable arches" - the love among men, the covenant of God. The in-listening says: if there is to be birth, the pain of labour, there must be a good reason. Also, we are all in this together. This is simple to know, but so often misnamed - except by folk who say: "A worry shared is a worry halved."
Dualities (like different cultures, or the contradictions in a personality) can remain themselves and still be brought into creative, critical harmony. To stuff oneself - or anything made by humans - into one single box is to be lost; unknown; unable. But our knowledge is supposed to set us, and our dog and chicken, free!*

Lace brush.

* 一人得道,雞犬皆升

Meditations on a Birthday

In Asia, only the oldest and youngest are given birthdays. In this way, the birthday is a landmark. But in the West, the birthday cake is often carted out every year, regardless of whether one has achieved so many milestones. And if one is to observe the birthday, does one give or receive gifts - like in life? Rarely does a year pass without such consideration.
The day can pass with as many vampires present as in the popular literature of the age. The birthday is less important than engaging in the battle to preserve the right to happiness in one's tiny little life. And by right to happiness, I mean taking a certain dose of acceptance that things do not necessarily have to go the way one expects or hopes - yet finding space beyond petty circumstance for expression and life.
To do this, it helps to experiment in how one lives one's life. What happens when I raise myself up? What happens when I lower myself, and observe people from my smallness? I have had more success in the latter, for people reveal their true colours when they do not perceive a threat. However, the problem is that few people have respect for what is small. If one is no longer within another person's sights, one cannot expect to be consulted or given space at the dinner table. At the time of the birthday, one can tally up the pluses and minuses of various experiments, and make changes.
With humour, of course. Because all it takes is a little bit of wit to turn an entire situation upside-down: any vampires can get stuffed back into a cheap paperback; sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And in the end, it was the jester who could tell the hardest truths. And in the end, does it really matter if one plays the fool so long as one is intent on learning?
There is such a thing as the interior life. Some may laugh at what to them seems a preposterous preposition. But who is that laugh on? From ancient times, as in the example of mnemonic practice, a palace has been known to exist in the mind. But one cannot invite friends to this palace, unless, paradoxically, they have a palace of their own. So no, it is not conducive to all society. And so yes, one is back to the treacherous waters of Appearance if one wants to engage a larger audience. If one considers birth to mean being born into that world, too.
The happiest people I have ever known have been those who worked with what they were given from birth - those who took whatever gifts they had, and refined them. To put this another way: some of the stoics who were the greatest rhetoricians were not such great stoics in practice.
The more education one has, the more sand one has to sift through, from which to pick out gold. The other side of that coin is that such education means that one has a palace - which is only apparent to those with similar education, or some kind of depth. Birthdays are not universal.

Tape.

Stones and Memories

It was a rocky weekend - at first. I was stuck on how the past can seem so distant, disconnected, and was thus weighed down. As I tried to sing along to tunes from where I grew up, I could not because my language skills have dwindled through disuse. One of the videos I perused began with the chimes of a clock at a ferry pier, where a near-by building housed a public library branch. I could tell you many things about that library and its books, but what I want to talk about today were the other floors in that building. One was a gallery of calligraphy and 国画, often referred to as Chinese watercolor or scroll painting. The latter uses the same techniques as the former: there is a 'right way' to paint, and much copying is done before one can paint one's own vision.
Most of the 国画 I saw as a small child was antique - so despite having friends who learned these techniques, I could only understand the painting as very drab, seeing as I was thinking of those darkened scrolls dating back so many dynasties ago. Only later did I come to understand how dynamic the compositions are. When they depict plants, each leaf seems to represent a jagged or graceful emotion; usually, too, there is an intriguing detail, like a little worm, a butterfly, or even the plant being reflected in a mirror. When they are of landscapes, one can observe the panorama, and then observe minute details of the landscape - like the mossy rocks, or intermissions of tiny staircases along mammoth mountains. But to my mind, a key feature of these paintings are the rocks (take a look, and see how many rocks are on this page). I also associate rocks with the ideal that nature is the master artist; that man, no matter how intelligent, can but humbly imitate it.
I think we all carry rocks in life. I literally brought some sea rocks back from Greece last year, now displayed in a ceramic dish on my desk, where I joyful rearrange them sometimes. Some of the rocks that we carry threaten to weigh us down. I think it is a matter of grace and honour to learn how to deal with them.
Sometimes we can lose a precious stone, like losing a language, yet the space of the language remains - and this can become a heavy rock of pain, unless one learns to paint this rock on the landscape of one's soul. This morning I was reading about Indian diplomats who write poetry in order to fill an emotional part of their life, not related to their profession. The more we open up our lives to a breadth of experience, in different countries or through a wide variety of friends, the more pain there is. Nobody tells you that as they say "it's so wonderful you've lived in so many countries". Nobody warns you that the more you get to know intimately, the more you will have to say goodbye. The more your heart will be in one place, but feel the violin twangs of calling out to visit a place from before.
So words, word pictures, pictures, music - art, can fill this void, can be the rub-off transfer for the rock that would otherwise ail. I do not think that we are to unload ourselves in art, as if it were simply therapy. Rather, like the Japanese stone garden or Chinese scholars' rocks (供石) I think we are to sort through our memories and stones, and create the idyllic landscape: a "best of".
There is a reason why there is a 'right way' to paint calligraphy. Order, mindfulness, and discipline are beautiful. Even the best of the "folk" artists express their own methodicalness. These days, I am dreaming of what my own idyllic landscape would be. We speak so much of what the "literature of the immigrant" or "exile" is - but what of the person who grows up in different lands, and misses them all? It is not an imagined landscape, yet it is not one that exists anywhere except in the heart and soul. I wonder how to paint it in the 'right way', in a way that is not just private.

 Watercolour dots.

Express

It is already one of those days that even the birds find too hot. This morning, I walked by a poor pigeon, languishing with feathers fluffed out in the only, cloudy, puddle it could find. The ravens give menacing looks from beneath the shade of trees, beaks open, reminding me of dogs - which are nowhere to be seen.
It is the kind of day in which one seems to live despite oneself, and the old folk in the market say, "So be it!" And it is on this kind of day that the troubling questions which had been lingering in the recess of the mind like to step forward, and say, "Hi." Although they are not usually that pleasant, and one sees them lurking there, just at the entrance, and one must coax them forwards, to get the exchange over with. This is what I call expression-which, after all, means the act of pressing out. But the word could hardly better explain, at least to my mind, what is involved in expression, "the action of squeezing out."
The other day, I tried to write about holidays, but today I realised what I was really trying to say. And that thought is the one that I coaxed forwards as I came back from the market. It had been hanging around my mind all week, only to come forth on this anxious day, when even the pigeons are hiding, far from the roofs they usually strut around on.
It is no wonder I feel alone, sometimes. We all do - it is like part of the weather: sometimes hot, sometimes cold - as the old folk say, "So be it!" But what I realised today was how in many ways my past is under threat of being chopped off, like an unwanted limb. And I so long for at least some remnants of "before." I have most successfully reconnected to it  by going on holiday - seeing old friends, repeating the old pattern of having the world as my oyster.
After realising this thought, which had been lingering like an unwanted child, I understood myself better. I often struggle with understanding myself better. As if I were always being asked by someone to explain myself, to settle the account of who I am. Who is this person? I don't know. But the questions begin as a reaction to conversations with people who sound so sure of themselves; in a move of self defeat, I usually indicate I am aware of my own weaknesses or shortcomings. I then feel driven to a process where I am moved to express myself, to myself.
I realise how much courage is necessary to live a beautiful life: one must be ready to laugh and cry. However hard we try to remain indifferent by installing the air conditioner of the mind, orphan thoughts can come forth from the depths and find us. If we want to remain alive, we must be ready to feel pain - unless we want to live with ghost limbs, but even they have been known to itch, mysteriously.
And it is only in asking the question, however painful, that one can get the answer. "So be it!" These are the ways of things. But one thing I can say: unless the heat is turned on, nothing's cooking. Mobility is sometimes spurred on when the fire is lit beneath one...

Dots.

holiday collectors

Tonight, the sky looked like the sea, with all those bluish lines of clouds and impressions of depth. The sky seemed to be calling to ships, to voyages...
I think that for the well-travelled person, the summer holiday becomes a matter of entitlement; once the horizon has been broadened, it becomes a matter of good circulation to keep various lands awake in the circuit of the mind.
For if I were asked to explain the salubrious effect of travel, I would list: the physical reminder that one truly does walk this earth in all its diversity; the tessera hospitalis one picks up - those Roman friendship symbols that are split in two: half kept by the host, the other by the visitor, in the case that they ever meet again, they will recognize each other. Those are beautiful things. But how necessary is it to travel?
Could one not expand the imagination by watching a good film, or documentary? Is travelling not like Disneyland for the sentient soul, verging on fantasy and desire? And as for the sights that we see,it is prudent to ask whether they make us into better people.
An answer lies in the tesserae; κύβος can either refer to those friendship tokens mentioned above, but it can also refer to dice used in the game of chance. The friendship tokens were made from the same material as dice, and were the same shape: cubed, though sometimes oblong. It is this very same word and shape that is used to make up the mosaic.
Today, not everybody has the opportunity to travel; it may seem that everything is so close, yet so far away. The soul may long to for a panopoly of sights and smells to be used as protection later on, to have the reassuring thought that I went there, breathed in the genius loci of a different place. But that wish may not necessarily be granted - so the element of the die, of chance, reminds one that such things are not always in one's control. That even the mosaic of travel is within a much larger mosaic - that of life, in which the travel so many of us grew up on did not always exist; a life in which the museum may be inferior to spending a day boating with friends.
The nicest kind of travel involves going to visit friends, because the time with the friend in a distant land can become like a leitmotif, framing the quotidian. Once upon a time, travelling salesmen would also sometimes be the bearer of stories. We crave those peeks into life that we bring to each other when we visit, or receive a guest in our home. We crave seeing what is around us everyday as something new, which happens through those experienced stories. Brought through travel or the traveller.
I don't know if the chance of my summer will open up to afford me travel; I hope so, but I do not want to feel enslaved to having to. Is this not like those indoctrinations that slip into our upbringing: a child must play the piano, must be an equestrian, must speak foreign languages. Will these activities necessarily make the child happier, wiser? Could it not develop intelligence through other means, like Rousseau's Emile? By extension, I wonder to myself if I have been taught to think I must travel, when all I need could be right in front of me. So, I end this post with the κύβος: no matter what we do this summer, may it be beautiful, bring character to the mosaic of our lives, and involve good friends and lots of laughs.

Dots.

anonymity

Old-skool translators know about that certain kind of anonymity which requires a faithfulness to a text, in which creativity works only to carry original meaning intact over the bridge of culture. There is no rewriting, or riffs based on the original.
Still, when I write about this, I can't help but add that this is only a fun job when the original text is beautiful to begin with. Because I remember being a green sub-editor and having a really hard time not making "interventions" to the original when it was... let's just say wanting. I still sometimes turn texts upsidedown when I work through them, it's as if I have to make my presence known in that first draft, if only to erase it in the final one.
But this is all "old-skool" now, because today one is told and encouraged to make one's presence directly visible in all one does. Just last week, in an hour-long digression on the Forbes site, I was amused by the article after article connected to self promotion. "Buy your own dot come," the message read, "in ten years, all hiring will be done via the web."
Links were followed, and I thought with awe that I could still get my very own website - and that there are things I'd be very proud to put on it. But I am not young enough to be rash all the time, and as I put the idea on the backburner, I suddenly realised that I do not aspire to be in the forefront of anything, anymore. I began to think about the people who work behind the scenes: like senators' aides, or the kind of researcher that brings a new body of historical work to light - which other people draw on, or old-skool translators.
And don't you think it's funny that there could be an overall message of everyone needing to stand in the public eye when there is a great need for people behind the scenes? There is a great need for people who want to try to listen and understand something that is not their own. Without it, all we write will be wanting because it will be too narrow in scope, self absorebd. We all know that the self absorbed are social bores and don't make others feel welcome.
This is my argument for anonymity. There is something beautiful in getting good work done, and letting the work have its own life, like a child. Children are gifts, not  birthrights. It is a gift to finish beautiful work and let that work, in turn, do its work. Any child laying on their floor reading a book and realising they aren't alone in the world knows what a gift such work is.
What a beautiful aspiration to become camouflaged into the background, to enable good work to trickle into the foreground. To become like the wise men and women of days of old: consulted by people from various walks of life, seeking advice. Being in the background allows one to be parts of many, many things, and also gives one the removed vantage point, which means clarity if one had been a particularly active youth, or has an excess of empathy.

Dots.

Much Love Monday

Shipping lines in the early 20th century were known to employ certain techniques to get passengers: one was to paint an "impression" of a destination through words, slogans, quotes. To think about the implications of such travel is to recognise the almost inarticulate allure of "words, slogans, quotes". By words are meant first-hand accounts; the stories we hear from friends, or friends of friends; slogans, "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere;" quotes, "When life gives you twists and turns, chic yourself up in Italy!"
We are tactile, emotional creatures: we retain that which has been given to us in heart-shaped containers. It is easier for us to patch together our impressions of a place, than it is to recite facts and figures, which are manifold and always changing, anyway. And so it goes for a person's life; we can have an impression of it. We seek to make ourselves intelligible through the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, to others. Hence the allure of the myth of the cliché, which does the talking for us.
Often, though, people's lives do not fit the cliché. They are often asked to explain themselves: their goals, life, identity. People want to know: if something is different, where does it fit in the larger map of things? Sometimes, the outline of a life is clearer to see, sometimes, not at all. It's like having that shipping brochure, then being on the boat for the very first time, feeling the lash and confusion of the sea.
I think we are both like the brochure and the maiden voyage. As I get older, I notice quite a number of my seniors who are unwilling to accept the turbulence of the voyage. They seem to prefer looking at themselves from the outside, which makes them haughty and crabby because they are working against nature, the nature that wants to humble them. But to fumble and tumble on the waves will leave us with a beautiful paradox: yes, we may be weak, but we also find we are strong; yes, we may be sensitive, but we can also be tough.

It is reassuring to think, and to see, that as we age, we can begin to file down the contours between the extremes-of the voyage and the gentle impression, but I do not think that this ever means that we know ourselves completely. Sometimes, when we least expect it, the flood gates swing open, and the valley is consumed.
And as for the gentle impression of ourselves-I don't know if we really ever possess it; rather, this is what we leave on others. Other people form impressions of the voyages we make. What we do have, though, is the clarification of our intent. Like, the intent to be happy, fair, and so on.
The most important dimension of human thought opens up at the "beginning" - beginnings are a seeking without knowledge of the ultimate "end". Beginnings are open, not fixed - and thus, rich in possibility. But here's the twist: something is only a beginning with relation to an end or a goal (all this, as per Gadamer). It is the end that gives meaning to the beginning. So, not only do we lack control of the impression of ourselves, but it would be fruitless to have one, as this would make redundant the purpose of living, which is to find that answer.
It should be all right to not know where we're going - so long as we have the navigation of good character. There was a beautiful article written on The Millions this week about a writer who is finding employment, against the odds, in an area she could not have foreseen a few years back. Why would we have to know how it will all pan out? We can skip to the end of a book, but not a life, because we've only just begun writing it. So, for today's Much Love Monday, I love beginnings. Whenever we need a new one, all we need to do is imagine all over again.

 Elements.

Much Love Monday

For today's Much Love Monday, I love the world in colour. And when I write that, I am thinking about the English etymology of world, which is connected both to man and to abode. So, to think of the world in colour is to think of man in his many shades, and where he lives, how he lives...
Spring's gentle breeze and longer sunny arms have transformed my flat into a beautiful place to be. The other day, I was playing around with a Kinder Egg toy that has a magnifying glass, and looking, for fun, at old issues of my Marie Claire magazines, when I realised I could use both in a MLM photo montage. There is something to be said of looking at pictures of places in magazines - it's like going to Musée de l'Homme; one sees not only a room, but how it is set up for life. But not all photos of rooms inspire me in this anthropological ways.
Marie Claire Maison used to be my favourite magazine, but a few years ago, I stopped being able to connect the photos with narratives of lived lives. The substitute I found to share with you today is an online version of this fun: An Indian Summer (via). If you visit, why not play this perfectly springy Jane Birkin soundtrack, which comes recommended by An Indian Summer's curator.
What I like about the selection of photos is that most of the blog posts contain photos with ideas that could be applied in any home: a tonne of pillow cases made from French tea towels, for instance, or different ways to feed the inner child through colour (this and this are my favourite examples).

When I saw those examples of colour use, I suddenly remembered the Mughal illuminations I used to admire at the MET (like this). I thought about my love of colour. Though I have white walls, it suddenly occurred to me that my flat is full of colour, from the carpeting and furniture, to the multicoloured books, pictures and bunting. I thought about how I have always felt a chasm between the cartoonish child-like aspects of self and the demands of professionalism. But, looking through AIS, I remembered colourful folk elements, which one can see even in my flat, and began to think of how precisely through such arts and crafts, one can keep alive the child and the sophistication of the adult.
The post that spoke most to me in this respect is Global Chic, which featured a Norwegian blog's collection of photos of global corners from readers' rooms and homes.
This is an aesthetic I can stand behind. I have already written about my childhood home, and my affinity for universal unity. In the latter post, I quoted Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote of bringing forth that glad acceptance which constantly carries in itself the giving out of the best that we have. But I still feel that the best that we have may require, in some cultures, a conscious effort to preserve older roots of what the culture is. While culture is rather complicated, especially as mankind keeps moving, I believe that we can talk of "cultures". My ideal vision of a "world in colour" is where everyone exchanges the glimpse of the world they have. We do not all have to be the same, so in this ideal picture, there is no power play, but a teaching of each other so we can remember those beautiful parts of our humanity that we want to keep alive, to pass down to other generations.

Elements: Animus.

paradoxes and a poem

There are times when one's own paradoxes surge to the surface. One can see hyper-responsibility alongside a kind of blind carelessness (blind, because it does not name itself, and only becomes apparent after the fact); one can see immense strength alongside an insecurity where three harsh words can crumble one's inner resources. And so on.
Claiming paradoxes, and understanding them, has always been a mystery to me. It seems that most people bury these paradoxes, so it is not as if one can go out and find a tonne of literature on the topic. It is as if we want to hide from ourselves our disparities.
But I remember long ago hearing the promise that if one addresses one's coarser side, one has the chance to finally smooth it out. So I seek people who are not afraid to say who they are - because it requires so much courage. I seek people who are courageous, in the hopes of cultivating my own.
And this reminds me of all those years ago, when I was becoming a young adult, and when I began to wonder about the deeper meaning of writing, of composing. I remember I met Clare, who said of her name: "It means clarity, in French, so I seek through my poems to reach clarity." What a novel idea, I thought! She played me a recording of her reading a poem of how one can come into oneself again when listening to whale song; a poem of seeking those whales in the night, of hearing them, of returning indoors to a warm cup of tea - something about womanhood, coming out of the darkness, and then, combined with her voice, the actual whale song she had recorded that night.

I wrote recently about how perhaps there is a crucial difference in how men and women approach their writing; I wonder if it may be that at certain times in history this becomes apparent, if whether it is not even necessary to name it at more peaceful times. But what I want to write about now is how many times I have encountered women, and now I count myself among them, who seek a form of healing through poetry. By writing that, I do not necessarily mean individually confessional poetry.
Ultimately, if we succeed in taking the world into ourselves, we can write about the experience of being human, and address those issues we all face. Such as rites of passage (where are they in our age!), or resolving the extremes within ourselves.
The thing about our age is that thanks to the development of Epicureanism through philosophers like Hume and right through the postmodernists, a system of thought has entered into the mainstream that accepts that life is chaotic. It accepts that there are no universal values, no universal system of meaning. The resulting challenge I think poetry ought to address in this climate is the reestablishment of unity, in order to heal - because healing does, after all, mean wholeness.
The other day, I received a poem from somebody I do not know, but to whom I had written first, as she writes a lively and rich blog. It was Wendell Berry's Healing, which I had never read. The poets I was exposed to during my undergrad years were very different, which is a whole other topic for conversation: the topography of poetry. Anyway, this poem is one of the most beautiful I have come across in a long time. And in that gesture, of being sent a poem from a distant soul, I remembered again that aspect of poetry I so crave: the personal touch, how poems come to one through people.
I suspect this was the magic of the bard in days past, but call it what we will, there is something so special about exchanging words related to topics that are deeply meaningful to us, in terms of how we are living our lives. I would love it if you would link back to this post with a topic that is meaningful to you, or to a favourite poem. In closing, - oh yes, and I am done, for now, with renovating my blog - here are a few lines of Healing:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, (...)

Elements: paper: pugly pixel; needlework: minitoko.

Poem excerpt in photo: Rilke's Torso of Apollo.

going natural

One of the sciences involving trees is called dendrochronology. It is the study of the cross section of a tree, where all those rings, or circles, are. Like Rilke's I live my life in widening circles... I had not known of that poem - even though I have read so much of Rilke's poetry, until I'd heard that radio programme the link will take you to. But I had written something that had tree rings in the title, which was my way of closing off a series of rings that constituted my beginning of where I live now.
What one of my work's reviewers failed to understand is that by analysing the rings of a tree, one can understand the climactic conditions of the entire region in which the tree grew. If we honuor the local, sometimes we give ourselves over to it, to be consumed by it, until we have made it our own. At which point, true creativity begins. But never without that nascent period. It must batter you (I quote the radio show), it must make you stretch a little more before the song can be sung through you (ditto), before you are a tree that can be played by the wind. The place I live is at a crossroads of many winds which rattle the windows all day long, as they are today, urging us to strengthen our cores!
But when, and if, we let such storms pass over us, we have a ring to show for it. It isn't easy, but isn't it necessary? It remains to be asked: How much do we let our surroundings into our lives (or do we fear pain, and say things like: I am always at the top of my game)? How much do we notice what's around us as we go about our daily chores (or does our fear blind us, making us the prefect pawn for global politics)? Do we notice the expression in the cashier's eyes, the old woman's Tower of Pisa gait, as she shuffles down the sidewalk?
Those are the qualities of the wood: it is exposed to the elements. It does not hide. And though we are not wood, and have souls, doesn't the soul come out of first accepting our very materiality? That we live somewhere, have certain memories, loved some places, were shaped by certain people?
The organic, the natural comes from first accepting the constellation of who we are, where we are, where we live. It is painful to look all those things in the eye, sometimes. But how else can we find out what we most deeply need? What balsam to use to attend to our surroundings?
Sometimes, the answer is in the simplest things. Like quality nourishment, eating local. I've been inspired by Ashley's recent food posts. Without frying the life out of food, but giving it gentle, warm baths... It is a time of cleaning, anyway, for many Christians. In the Orthodox Church, this is the first week of the Great Fast, which means no oil (except that in bread).
Today, I made a cauliflower soup by first dry cooking onion (in a pot, with no water, until it browns), then adding potato, carrot and later cauliflower - adding bit by bit of water. I used the herbs I had on hand, and two kinds of chillies. I made fresh wheat buns, using my pizza stone (lugged all the way from the US by a friend!). The buns call for 1 kg what flour, a little over half a litre of soda water, a packet of organic dry yeast, 3 tsp salt, 4 tbsp sugar, 9 tbsp oil. The ingredients are mixed, allowed to rise, cut into smaller portions, when a tiny bit more oil is added, allowed to rise shortly, then baked.
There is a special joy to eating simply. And it definitely helps direct the mind to questions like: what is really important? How can I learn to treat my body better? How can I learn to think better?

Elements: needlework: minitoko; starburst: pugly pixel.

Recognition

Last week, my students engaged in a conversation about wisdom, and one claimed that wisdom makes people sad. The implications of her point aside (for this post), I reminded her of the goals of the early philosophical schools, which aimed to increase the quality of one's lived life (see Hadot). Similarly, a Chinese adage advises: do more by doing less. I think that if we learn our lessons in life, while we will never become absolved of problems, our way of dealing with them will improve.
Gadamer writes of "recognition" - that we go through life in search of those symbols that elicit the permanent from the transient (like the themes in a good movie we watch again and again to remind ourselves of certain truths). He explains recognition is how we "make ourselves at home in the world." It happens when we get to know something we're already familiar with more authentically. To demonstrate what he means, he uses the example of tessera hospitalis: an object was split in half by a host, who would give one half to their guest. If they were to meet again, they would rejoin the two halved objects.
I think that recognition precisely must work through others: that there is no recognition without other people as the medium, our missing halves, if you will.
Part of our wisdom lies in others in the sense that others will either remind us to exercise wisdom, or test us through their carelessness, or acedia.
So, there can be a looking to others in order to recognise oneself: either as who one wants to be, or in terms of what one needs to work on to become better. It is a two-sided mirror, always in flux.
And where better to see this dance of relationships transpire for analysis than the theatre, which the ancient Greeks understood well. They attempted to resolve the enigma of our existence through myths that represent aspects of our world: death, love, catastrophe, jubilation, perplexity, kindness... To quote Gadamer, those myths "remain real for us because we too can still be dismayed by a sudden transformation in the appearance of things - one event can change everything at a stroke."
Which means that when we look to others for recognition, there will be times when the outward appearance is only our mirror insofar as it helps us realise what is worth recognising about ourselves or this transient life. To quote the sufi poets: Whether your destiny is glory or disgrace, purify yourself of hatred and love of self. And another fragment, We are as pieces of chess engaged in victory and defeat: our victory and defeat is from Thee, other whose qualities are comely!... We are lions, but lions on a banner: because of the wind they are rushing onward from moment to moment.
Amongst such flux, hopefully hammering the character into shape, They appear in the world, to dive deep into that ocean, to gather pearls. Pearls of recognition...

Elements: stripy paper, sequins, doily: pugly pixel;

retro ticket: Just Something I Made.

Fashioning

In many ways, I do not feel that I belong to this age. I feel that my sensibilities belong to a past time, and can demonstrate this by how much I enjoyed a primary school project we had to do, called "Manners". However, as I continue to read about what I'd describe as the history of ideas, I have discovered aspects of myself that are deeply married to this age.
Let us call this a pluralistic approach to culture; I share an openness to cultural variety and reject comparing them on a standardised scale. While such an approach is already more than 200 years old, I would say it is characteristic only of a post World War II world (do you see the tautology there?).
I have found that my earlier approach to poetry was by no means original, but the same old hash that has been bantering around in different guises since the Romantics took Soul to the streets. I now understand, for example, my frustration at not being able to get over myself in my poems, and now see this as an extension of the bourgeois obsession of self, as seen in Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust.
I once wanted to distance myself from the West and such idiosyncrasies, and have since found that I am not unlike Rilke, or even any of the Romantics who sought a return "to the basics", back to a more peasant lifestyle. Such reactionism has already been played out. Or has it?
Here is where I see the exciting moment of my life: the place where I can make my contribution. Here, I'm thinking of Ricoeur's thought that "No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations... We have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of authentic dialogue." Not have we resolved how to "become modern and return to sources".

This has not happened because some cultures are still being masked over by the "barbaric" projections of the West, and have not been given the space to develop their own dialogue. I am still grateful to Deborah Root's Cannibal Cultures for revealing that just as one man can "project on" another, societies can do the same on a larger scale. And it is fascinating to me that people who pride themselves as "free thinkers" can stumble into such blind spots. Or that in today's self-proclaimed 'free world dialogue' people who speak in the name of faith are automatically considered backwards even though it is proved time and again that any system of thought is backward if it becomes dogma or too rigid. It is not the thought system that becomes harmful, but the zeal with which one subscribes to it.
The modern project is far from being over. Terms like "post modernism" trick us into thinking that we are ahead of the game, as if we, as a human race, have become older. I do not like such thinking, because it implies "wisdom" - which has been discredited by many modern thinkers as irrelevant. Perhaps they discredit it because it is the measuring rod they do not perform well against. The context of the word is indeed a little slippery, because it involves betterment of self, but is it not relevant to ask: is it wise to wage war?
What I have learned from studying culture is that it does not move in one direction. It is received, reshaped, given back; hybrids emerge. My favourite example is the way that many African subcultures literally refashion Western fashions (ex. here). This is an example of how the modern project is far from being over. Culture is not static, it is constantly in flux, and at the moment, we are in a phase of absorbing the great changes in communication that have taken place in the past half century. New and unexpected forms will emerge - and they will not be the kind controlled by the modernist project. Why? Because just as much as culture is dictated and assimilated, it is also refashioned. Because not all voices are heard all the time, unexpected songs can emerge from where they are least expected. It is exciting to live in one's time, though certainly not without its challenges.

Elements: buttons and embroidery: minitoko;

manila bag, graph paper, sequins: pugly pixel;

staple: shabby princess.